Mapping the political landscape from data traces: multidimensional opinions of users, politicians and media outlets on X

2026-02-06

AI Summary

This study addresses the limitations of existing political stance analysis, which predominantly relies on a unidimensional left–right spectrum rooted in the U.S. context and fails to capture the nuanced positions of users, politicians, and media across multiple policy dimensions in diverse democracies. To overcome this constraint, the work introduces the first multidimensional political stance dataset applicable across multiple countries, encompassing key dimensions such as immigration, European Union attitudes, liberal values, views on elites and institutions, nationalism, and environmental concerns. Leveraging behavioral data from the X platform and integrating content analysis with stance inference techniques, the authors develop a multidimensional positioning framework that incorporates activity-based metrics. Empirical validation demonstrates that the dataset and its associated benchmarks effectively support research on polarization and information diversity, substantially expanding the scope of computational political science beyond U.S.-centric paradigms.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Natural Language Processing: Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, and Argument Mining
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Preferences

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• Social Networks and Social Media: Media and governance, opinion dynamics, filter bubbles, polarization
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasets

Abstract

Studying political activity on social media often requires defining and measuring political stances of users or content. Relevant examples include the study of opinion polarization, or the study of political diversity in online content diets. While many research designs rely on operationalizations best suited for the US setting, few allow addressing more general political systems, in which users and media outlets might exhibit stances on multiple ideology and issue dimensions, going beyond traditional Liberal-Conservative or Left-Right scales. To advance the study of more general online ecosystems, we present a dataset pertaining to a population of X/Twitter users, parliamentarians, and media outlets embedded in a political space spanned by dimensions measuring attitudes towards immigration, the EU, liberal values, elites and institutions, nationalism and the environment, in addition to left-right and liberal-conservative scales. We include indicators of individual activity and popularity: mean number of posts per day, number of followers, and number of followees. We provide several benchmarks validating the positions of these entities and discuss several applications for this dataset.

Problem

• political stance
• multidimensional ideology
• social media
• political polarization
• online political landscape

Innovation

• multidimensional political mapping
• social media political stance
• ideological dimensions
• online political ecosystem
• X/Twitter dataset